Design for All versus Design for One and Adaptive User Interfaces

The Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII) is an open-source infrastructure developed by Cloud4all and several other R&D projects that aims to support automatically adaptive user interfaces and thus enable "Design for One".

Design for All strives to create user interfaces "for human diversity, social inclusion and equality" (EIDD Stockholm Declaration, 2004). In spite of its name, the goal of Design for All is not to create a single solution for everybody ("one size fits all"). However, most software comes with settings and options that need to be tweaked by the user, and most users never change a program's settings. Many users are unaware of the available settings, they are afraid of breaking something, etc. What is needed is software that adapts to the user's needs and preferences, so users don't need to worry about where to find the settings. Ideally, the user's needs and preferences should also be "translatable" to other systems, e.g. from a desktop PC to mobile devices, websites and ticket vending machines. The Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII) is an open-source infrastructure developed by Cloud4all and several other R&D projects that aims to support automatically adaptive user interfaces and thus enable "Design for One". However, even this approach assumes that interfaces have accessibility features (though not necessarily enabled by default), so it does not make Design for All redundant.

This talk is intended as an introduction to a more technical talk about GPII in the same devroom.